Fancestor

“…the history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest….” Howard Zinn, A People’s History 1980 “There seems to be something willful, something almost luxurious in your desire to feel ashamed of the past.” -Duncan Campbell Scott, Conversations With a Dead Man by Mark Abley 2013      A hundred years after the fact, on the so-called “civilized” east coast of 1879, the Sullivan/Clinton Expedition was considered a patriotic, ancient military campaign by the time General Tecumseh Sherman took the platform to give his memorial speech; in front of the adoring centennial crowd in upstate New York. After the Civil War, military men and armchair historians enjoyed a sort of heyday, bringing the musket, tomahawk and scalping knife back into parlors and auditoriums of genteel society. Men like Rev. Charles Rockwell, Sam Eager and James Quinlan, joined more scholarly, yet flawed, intellects like William L. Stone and F...

  “Before quitting the scene of his brutal butchery, looking first in at one window, then at the other.”-George J Mastin       Now we stand before the second canvas. Each canvas looks like a different sign painter tackled it. This artist’s hand is more skilled. It is an interior scene, the dying young George, the baby is draped in his sister’s arms. Streams of red paint run down his creamy white bedclothes. His head is gently cradled,(Christ like) by Helen Holmes, standing safely behind the locked raised panel door. Julia and Helen’s eyes implore each other, over John Van Nest’s body propped against the wall. For the moment they are safe. But wait! Bill’s still there, LOOK! Behind the window- again the racist, rolling white, google eyes, and obscene grin, luridly intruding into the room, seeking more victims, phallic spear raised……   Helen Holmes (victim) sworn: “I was at the house of John G. Van Nest the night when he and his wife and chi...

“As I sat myself down by the side of my mother, I began to tell her of the pains and miseries, the hard usages and ill treatments to which I had passed through, until the clock struck the hour of ten, and I retired to rest and fell in the arms of sleep and began to dream of the tortures and torments to which I had passed…..”   -Austin Reed The Life and Confessions of a Haunted Convict       In the late 1840’s a tailor and aspiring showman from Genoa, New York, by the name of George J. Mastin would pick up an old Daily Cayuga Tocsin and be reminded of a crime so horrific it defied comprehension. A perfect family in a tidy house along the lake behind a picket fence in the moonlight, was senselessly butchered by a “insane, negro madman.” Mastin remembered the case well. Suddenly he saw it very clearly—fear could be monetized—murder as entertainment. Where others saw unspeakable tragedy, better left forgotten, Mastin saw profit in reliving the tragedy. Wh...